Powerful Republican Turns on Pentagon Pete’s ‘Kill’ Orders
dnyuz.com
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s alleged order to “kill” everyone aboard a suspected Venezuelan drug boat is slated to face intense oversight by the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee.
SASC chair Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, and SASC member Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, released a joint statement Friday promising “vigorous oversight” into the facts regarding a Sept. 2 drug boat strike in which the U.S. killed everyone aboard a suspected narcotics vessel, then killed the two survivors of its first attack with another missile.
On Friday, the Washington Post reported that on Sept. 2, Pete Hegseth ordered that the U.S. military kill everyone on board a boat suspected of carrying narcotics off the coast of Trinidad.
A missile struck the vessel and killed nine of the eleven people aboard the ship. When the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack realized there were two survivors in the water, he fired a second shot to comply with Hegseth’s order, killing the remaining survivors.
The order may amount to a war crime—and therefore punishable by a fine, imprisonment, or death, per the U.S.’s definition of war crimes, which can apply to U.S. nationals and armed service members.
Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer, told the Post that the attack “amounts to murder,” because Venezuela and the U.S. are not in an armed conflict.
The order to kill everyone on board “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” he said.
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